Listen to My Hands
by CitronPresse
Summary: Post 5.13, taking account of 5.14 promo. Mark reflects on past, present and bad timing and offers Addison affection. Pairing: Mark/Addison; references to Mark/Lexie.


A/N: The title comes from _Song for You_ by Alexi Murdoch. Many thanks to Escapismrocks for the read-through. It was hard to know which genres to pick for this and there's a little angst as well as the friendship and (sort of) romance.

* * *

Everyone is sitting around the conference room. There's some sporadic conversation as Naomi relates everything back to anecdotes from her own life; Sam offers little bits of distilled wisdom; Derek casually armor-plates his heart and looks around for Meredith; and Addison alternates between frantically talking on her cell to members of her family and wild-eyed, abandoned silence. You? You're just there. That was pretty much always your role with this group. That and making wisecracks that burst their bubbles of hypocrisy and that's not going to fly right now. It's tempting, but even the version of you that is kept alive by their shared assumptions isn't quite that crass.

You try to feel bad about Archer. Not in a generic life-cut-short kind of way, but actually feel bad that this guy you used to know as a living, breathing person is dead. But honestly, you never really liked the son-of-a-bitch. One night, when you were in your twenties, he lured you into a game of strip poker with some women he'd rounded up and the whole thing ended in much dirtier games. The next morning, he bought you breakfast and told you he knew you liked Addison and that a dirty bastard like you wasn't good enough for her. Your response was predictable; something deflecting. You don't remember what you said, because he'd crushed you and that was the part that stuck. Archer didn't have a leg to stand on; he out-dirtied you in every possible way. But he was a Montgomery, he was her brother, and his opinion coincided with your low expectations. You gave up then, offered no resistance — except privately in your head sometimes, when a haze of alcohol clarified your thoughts — when Addison fell in love with Derek. Of course, Derek wasn't good enough either: he was clean but insufficiently patrician. But Addison defended him. In retrospect, you've wondered whether she would have defended you; you're not sure you would like the answer to that question, though.

"I should go." Derek stands up and puts a hand on Addison's shoulder. "I'm sorry, Addie."

Derek, you do feel bad for, despite the attitude he's affecting. She called him in her hour of need and he failed. You know the feeling, although you were only ever called for sex, not life-saving neurosurgery. You've felt it, more or less intensely, since the day she left you in New York.

Addison nods. "Thank you, Derek," she says listlessly, folds her hands in her lap and looks down at them.

Naomi starts to twitter, seeking confirmation with every word from Sam, who does his agreeable, shrugging thing that can be taken either way. "Maybe we should get coffee?" she says. "Or something to eat?"

Addison swallows. "I'm fine, Nae," she says. "But you go if you want to." She looks up. "Mark, why don't you take Naomi and Sam to the cafeteria?"

It's a dismissal. A part of you doesn't like it, but a part of you is relieved. You don't know what to do, or say or be for her anyway. So you go the cafeteria and watch Naomi eat cake and ponder how you would explain to Lexie that the reason you're spending time with this confused and confusing ex-couple instead of with her is because right now they're the closest you can get to Addison.

* * *

Much later, you find Addison in an on-call room. She is laying, flat on her back and legs straight, glassy eyes staring at the ceiling and, if her arms were crossed upwards on her chest rather than rigidly by her sides, you would swear she was rehearsing her own death.

When you close the door, her eyes flicker towards you. "Sex is not the cure for everything, Mark," she says aridly.

Archer's emergency and tact that you hadn't expected from Seattle Grace had kept her ignorant of your on-call room humiliation. Sex is a possibility now: Hunt had done a good job, meticulous, like Callie said. But since then on-call rooms and sex aren't quite as synonymous for you as they once were. And even if they were, that's not what you're here for.

You sit down on the edge of the bed and she stiffens a little when she feels your weight. You reach out a hand and stroke her hair.

She jerks her head away. "What are you doing?"

"Sshhh," you say and maneuver yourself onto the bed, laying alongside her. Your next move would have always been to wrap her legs in the intimate grasp of one of yours. It was a habitual prelude. But you know she doesn't want that and you know you shouldn't be doing it, so you stay carefully aligned.

"Something I learned," you say and stroke her hair again.

She rasps in a breath and shuts her eyes to try to stop the tears that creep out between her eyelashes anyway. Then she leans her head, minimally, in your direction and you run your hand over her smooth hair again.

"Why . . . ?"

"Derek did everything he could," you say because sometimes even surgeons need to hear the same platitudes as everyone else and because you're absolutely sure that he did, if only for the sake of holding his self-concept together, and you're compelled to defend him. "People die, Add."

She shakes her head. "No," she says. "You. Why weren't you like this before?"

It's too complicated to explain. You're giving her what Lexie gives you. You wish you didn't want to; you wish it wasn't too late; you wish you'd been able to decode your feelings for her when it mattered a damn and before they would hurt someone who cares for you. Why the hell _weren't_ you like this before?

"I didn't know how," you say honestly.

She gasps back tears and allows her head to fall against yours, committing to the contact. You hold her and caress her with an even rhythm, feeling the comfort she takes from your touch, and wish that you _had_ known how. How to tell Archer to mind his own goddamn business; how to love Addison, when you finally got the chance, in a way she might have actually noticed; how to offer her what she needed without taking love secondhand from a kind, twenty-four year old girl who doesn't realize, any more than you did until Addison showed up again, that although your feelings are intense and real they are parts left over from a whole that you long for but shy away from because reliving it only seems to bring dysfunction and pain.

But that's not what you're here for either. You're just here to stroke her hair.


End file.
